Year: 2012

Dear Al, you are fired!

Being fired is usually not much fun.  But as far as firings go, this one is pretty funny – as reported on Slashdot:

On Friday, more than 1,300 employees of London-based Aviva Investors walked into their offices, strolled over to their desks, booted up their computers and checked their emails, only to learn the shocking news: They would be leaving the company. The email ordered them to hand over company property and security passes before leaving the building, and left the staff with one final line: ‘I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and wish you all the best for the future. ‘This email was sent to Aviva’s worldwide staff of 1,300 people, with bases in the U.S., UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Finland and the Netherlands. And it was all one giant mistake: The email was intended for only one individual.

Obviously, in the corporate address book, “All Stuff” and “Al Not-the-Pacino” were right next to each other…

Weekly digest – 2012-04-22

Karma-based pricing models for games

Slashdot links to an interview with Gabe Newell, of the Valve fame.  I think this idea is pretty interesting:

The issue that we’re struggling with quite a bit is something I’ve kind of talked about before, which is: how do you properly value people’s contributions to a community? … An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with. … “So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get DOTA 2 for free, because of past behavior in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice.’

Karma-based systems aren’t the easiest ones to figure out.  But they have plenty of potential.  Given enough will, effort, and tweaking, I think this can be done.  How well it will actually work – remains to be seen.

Maintenance screen from BannersBroker.com

No matter how big or small you are, how much money you’ve invested into your infrastructure, how many levels of redundancy you have, or how many IT gods and gurus you’ve hired to watch over your website – the fact of life is that your website will go down, even if it’s for a brief moment.   And you should be ready for that moment.  Here is a good example that I came across recently – BannersBroker.com maintenance screen.

It looks simple and and straight-forward.  But if you are even remotely familiar with web development and design, you can appreciate how much thinking actually went into this one.  First of all, the mere fact that there is a maintenance screen, means that someone thought plenty about the website.  Secondly, it’s very well composed.   The big yellow helmet and large, bold “Under maintenance” letters both tell you exactly what’s going on.  It’s not a user error.  It’s not a crashed server.  It’s not something to report to the webmaster.  They are working on it.  Thirdly, it tells you exactly when to come back – in 30 minutes.  Fourthly, it still provides you with an emergency contact information – phone number and email.  Fifthly, it gives you something to do for thirty minutes that the site is going to be down – explore the company’s YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter stream.  Sixthly, it reinforces the company brand.  Twice, in full color and full name, and in black-and-white small logo.  Seventhly, it doesn’t have any useless junk.  What else could you wish for?

To me, this is up there with Twitter fail whale and GitHub 404.